1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to migration of virtual machines and more specifically to constraining auto live migration of virtual machines using group tags, time constraints, and an access control list.
2. Introduction
A virtual machine is a software implementation of a computer that operates like a physical machine and can be managed by a hypervisor, as a guest. Multiple virtual machines can be installed on a single physical computer managed by a single hypervisor. A hypervisor is a hardware virtualization technique that allows multiple operating systems (guests) to run concurrently on a host computer and is commonly installed on server hardware. The hypervisor manages the operating system of the guest (that can also act as a server) and provides a virtual operating platform for one or more virtual machines. Advantages of utilizing virtual machines are that multiple operating systems can co-exist on the same computer (in complete isolation from each other) and a virtual machine can use an instruction set different than the real machine. For example, a computer programmer could benefit from having multiple operating systems installed on one machine; a Linux-based OS for ease of application development and a Windows OS dedicated for non-development tasks.
Live migration of a guest virtual machine refers to moving a virtual machine from one hypervisor to another without interrupting the functioning of the virtual machine. Due to load balancing, existing policies, or for other reasons it is necessary to migrate virtual machines between hypervisors. Live migration can occur between any two host hypervisors that are compatible. Compatibility is defined by the virtualization technology being used or the CPU architectures shared between hypervisors. For example, only host hypervisors of the same CPU architecture can migrate live virtual machines between one another.
Currently, live migration can occur between any two compatible hypervisors allowing different types of virtual machines to reside on the same hypervisor. Users of virtual machines and auto live migration often wish to automatically restrict live migration to only include a subset of hypervisors for different types of virtual machines for a period of time, or to control access using an access control list; which is not possible with the current state of the art.